


heaven only knows what i find

by 13pens



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Non-Explicit Sex, On the Road to Healing, Post-Canon, Suicidal Ideation, issues TM, the trials of caring for a cat in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28382391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13pens/pseuds/13pens
Summary: Dutch gets a cat.
Relationships: Aneela & Dutch | Yalena Yardeen & Yalena Kin Rit, Dutch | Yalena Yardeen & D'avin Jaqobis, Dutch | Yalena Yardeen/Delle Seyah Kendry
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	heaven only knows what i find

**Author's Note:**

> hello again!!! i wrote this sometime in august and then just didn't have the time to edit during the semester. now i am on break and so here it is. i miss killjoys very much!!!
> 
> this fic borrows some elements from my previous fics, but aren't necessarily in the same universe.
> 
> title is from the song "It's Alright" by Mother Mother.
> 
>  **content warning:** mentions of suicidal ideation / an attempt, mentions of alcohol abuse, recreational drug use

Aneela presents it to Dutch like a middle-school assembly magician: out of a black top hat and with a too eager expression on her face. Perhaps there’s a waggle of the fingers for a jazzy effect. None of it suits her, which means she’s putting in a gargantuan amount of effort.

“It’s a cat,” Dutch states blankly at the calico blob before her.

The thing’s eyes look in two different directions and slobbers over the table between them, looking globally unaffected.

“It is a cat,” Aneela echoes. “I thought you might like his company. Like how you liked Johnny Favorite.”

Dutch gives it a gentle scritch right between its frog-distance eyes, not quite immune to the way he leans into the touch and starts to purr. She does not ask how Aneela saw this sad creature and thought of Johnny. The cat goes supine, end of his tail wiggling serenely.

“Where did you get him?”

“Rescued him from the clutches of Xyah Kendry and Mavo Derrish, who have both fancied themselves future surgeons,” sniffs Aneela, playing with the calico’s feet and tapping its pink toe beans. “Jaq wanted to keep this little beauty. I would have said yes, but alas. Dear Kendry is allergic.”

In the midst of all the affection, the cat promptly falls right asleep, snoring lightly. Dutch does not ask either how a couple of teenagers on Qresh got their hands on a calico. Across from her, Aneela leans in with a set of shiny puppy eyes, a quiet beg.

“Okay. Fine,” Dutch relents. “But no take-backsies. This bebe is all mine.” She scoops said bebe up like an actual baby and nuzzles it with a teasing pucker of her mouth, stirring the cat awake who then lets out some contented _meeps_.

She is tired all over but genuinely warmed by Aneela’s gift. After al the ones she had turned down in the past few months after the— _incident—_ the least she could do was take in the fucking thing.

How hard could it be.

*

The cat pisses all over her damn ship and gets lost in the ventilation before she can even decide on a name, which—great. She’s gone from being alone on a ship to being alone on a stinky ship.

“See anything, Fancy?”

“No,” he responds, voice echoing in the vents. “But I smell a whole fucking lot.”

“Well stop sniffing and start looking.”

“Hey. Be nicer or I’ll retreat my slender crevice-friendly body out of here.”

Dutch mops at the floor, biting her tongue to keep herself from mentioning that her appeal to his vanity was merely a tactic to avoid the vent pee herself.

By the time she’s finished and inhaled enough bleach particles to strip the mucus out of her nostrils, Fancy wriggles out of the vent with the sleeping beauty nestled into his arms, legs dangling and then dropping with graceful finality. He turns around with a ta-da, presenting it to her with outstretched arms.

“Excellent work, soldier,” Dutch says unenthusiastically, lifting up her face shield. “How much extra to give that bugger a bath?”

“It’s a cat, Dutch,” Fancy says, offended and pulling the cat back close to him. Then he catches a whiff and reconsiders entirely. “Because you’re my friend I will do it for free.”

After the ordeal, the cat’s piss paws are clean; Fancy takes the extra step of supplying Dutch some Leith-grade litter (“Whatever you got for discount was a disgrace. Not even a rat would deign lay its shit there”) and copious cans of wet food. All things Dutch could have done herself, if she had the energy.

Too good to her, he sets down two tumblers of some cocktail he prepared in her kitchen, a mixture of which is like 99% vodka and 1% other death juice. The bottom of the glass meets its zenith as Dutch downs it all, earning a sympathetic stare from Fancy.

“You’re missed at the RAC,” he says. The bebe munches the wet fish mix in his bowl with lazy and noisy _mlam mlam mlam_ s in the background. “Turin has taken to yelling at the Qeurig.”

“He’s always yelled at the Qeurig. It’s a Qeurig.”

“Well he yells a lot more. He broke one just by shouting at it like it was in boot camp.”

Dutch scoffs, eyes unfocusing and refocusing on the cat’s slowly emptying food bowl.

Johnny would have been thrilled to have it on the ship. If he were around, that is, and not traipsing around asteroid belts with his new nerd wife. And so would D’av—if Dutch _were_ the wife. The line of thought causes her facial muscles to tick in annoyance, and she rudely downs Fancy’s own unfinished death juice until it burns away her neurons.

“I’m not on my A-game,” she says. “Turn would have put me on leave if I hadn’t taken it myself.”

Fancy’s hand goes flat on the table. “’Leave’ is a weird thing to call it, Dutch.”

She deflects his gentle reprimand, closing that door before he even knocks on it. She stands up and takes the tumblers to the sink. “’Leave’ is what you should do now, Fancy. It’s shit balls o’clock. I’ll Wenmo the joy I owe you.”

Unlike either Jaqobis would have done, he doesn’t chase. Perhaps that’s why she asked for him and not anyone else for the cat troubles. “Okay,” he says, then pauses to point a warning finger to Dutch mid-rise: “Do _not_ put another stupid note on it for all my contacts to see. The last one set off too many godsdamn rumors.”

“It’s not a rumour that you and Turin are dating.”

“Oh, go to hells.”

* * *

Her ceiling has thirty-five tiles. Five by seven, each larger than one square foot or else she’d be in a shoe box. Sometimes she looks at it like a blank piece of graph paper. Two-three and one-three have rust, or mold, or some other stain, whatever it is. Kendry had always nagged her that she needed better ventilation. Five-seven is slightly popped out of its place, as it was where she used to keep her emergency bottles of booze, for what kind of emergency she doesn’t remember.

She ought to stop staring at this fucking ceiling. Four-six has a sharp dent on the upper right corner, and a pockmark that never fails to remind her how it got there: she had thrown one of her knives in the air out of manic desperation, some days after she jilted D’avin at the altar.

Okay. So what she did was call it off the night before anyone was anywhere near said altar, but it hurt him just the same. The fact that he still tries to call her, still sends her texts asking her how she’s doing, two months after the event, only makes her shame feel heavier. Heavier still, when she ignores them to speaks to him in a laconic haze.

This routine suffering is interrupted by the bebe, who has taken a liking to lying with her. Dutch would be fooling absolutely no one to deny him when he struggles up the height of her bed to keep her company. She doesn’t even push him off when the furry gelatinous dumbbell of his body insists on resting on her trachea.

The vibrations of his heavy purrs are medicinal. Perhaps worth the throat crushing, and how he occasionally stands up on her sternum to shift position. Instead of each scuff on the ceiling, she maps each patch of orange and black on thick white hair, and Aneela would be pleased to know that her hands are doing something other than holding a drink.

Dutch falls asleep, the two snoring a quiet symphony.

* * *

The first thing Dutch hears when she opens the boarding gate is Jaq’s bright and deepening “Hey Dutch”, which is soon followed by Kendry nearly sneezing her lungs out behind him when the bebe makes a beeline for her.

“Please,” Kendry’s face scrunches up in distaste and in anticipation of another sneeze, restraining herself from kicking at the thing nuzzling her feet. “Control your animal.”

Jaq lifts him up with a struggle, earning some whiny _mows,_ but once cradled and content in his arms, he allows Jaq to head to the hull and away from his allergic mother.

“What are you doing here?” Dutch asks Kendry. “Thought I was just hosting Jaq.”

Hullen Bitch Supreme blows into a handkerchief. Dutch half expects her to toss it her way to figure out disposal, and prepares a quip about Qresh cooties.

“Aneela sent me,” she says, not bothering with any other pretense, as if she could with that amount of unseemly congestion. “She would be here herself.” Kendry gives a shit-eating pink-nosed grin. “But historically, we both know I’m more equipped to put a smile on that grumpy face of yours.”

“Uhuh,” Dutch says; the absurdity of Kendry flirting while in desperate need of a Benadryl indeed puts a smile on this grumpy face of hers. “Because it’s _soooo_ sexy when your nose gets all runny.”

Jaq busies himself with the cat he still truly believes should have been his; meanwhile the grownups busy themselves with each other, though not before Dutch has given her the Benadryl. Sleeping around with her had been a casual all-relevant-parties-sanctioned ritual for so long that the runny nose isn’t actually the turn-off it should be, but she’d also rather not get Her Majesty’s mucus all over herself.

Kendry lights a joint in their naked aftermath, wrapped up in Dutch’s scratchy bedsheets.

“You’re a terrible influence,” Dutch murmurs, body buzzing. In the wake of her orgasms, she’s realized that this was one of Kendry’s comfort/pity bones—that she can tell because of the absence of grimaces and objections when Dutch keeps an arm rested over Kendry’s warm belly.

Pretentious silky smoke leaves her mouth in a sigh. “You’re one to talk, Miss Perpetual-BAC-of-Point-Zero-Eight,” she retorts, all while passing the joint to Dutch, who politely declines.

Kendry sets it aside to lay back down to face Dutch. She smells like that terrible Qush and even after some hefty fucking, like that perfume she loves to abuse. Fingers set back wisps of wavy hair behind Dutch’s ear. The lightness of it sends a tingle down her neck, and for the plentieth time that evening she thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been touched this way, in her bed. Kendry would not entertain even _joking_ about scheduling a horny escapade for weeks after Aneela had found Dutch on the edge of the J cluster.

“You’re being broody,” Kendry observes. “Talk to me, Yala.”

Dutch flinches at this kind of tenderness, Kendry’s brand of it notwithstanding.

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

Kendry massages her fingers at the nape of her neck. Any less faith in her, she’d accuse her of manipulation, pulling a fucking D’avin mannerism like that.

“Stop.”

She stops. Dutch disentangles herself from the aching warmth of Kendry’s body to sit up against the headboard, pulling her knees closer to herself under the covers.

“Why did you wait until the night before?” Kendry asks. What a fucking question.

“Because I thought I was sure,” Dutch answers anyway. “Until I wasn’t.”

“Well, what _are_ you sure of?”

“I don’t know.”

Kendry lets out a light scoff. “That can’t be true.”

Clicking her teeth in irritation, Dutch flips the covers over aggressively with her legs and rises in fruitless search of her underwear. “Well if I fucking knew that, Seyah, I wouldn’t be wasting away alone and unemployed, with only the company of a furball I barely know how to take care of, and taking last-minute booty calls from _you_.”

Kendry sighs, languidly following suit and reaching under the bed to toss Dutch her underthings, locating her own and putting them back on.

“You should find out,” she commands, voice stripped of her usual playful Delle Seyesque antics. “Because Aneela is still hurting over your stunt afterwards.”

The rustle of Dutch tugging down a large T-shirt over her body is the only response for a while. Then she sits next to Kendry on the side of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” Dutch says quietly, and if Kendry is surprised to hear such an admission she does not show it. “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

“Or Jaq,” adds Kendry.

“Or Jaq.”

“Or _me_.”

Dutch begins to sniffle. “Or you.”

“Because you did. You scared me. _Me_.” Kendry points at herself with a sharp finger for measure, making Dutch laugh under her increasing tears.

“Un-fucking-believable. You’re going to be ruling the universe forever, and your two weaknesses are cat dander and Aneela variants.”

“ _Aneela_ _variants_ ,” Kendry repeats, offended. “I’ll end you.”

Dutch leans over to kiss her on the cheek, which reduces the warning that was brittle in the first place into a goopy self-satisfied smile, like the simp that she is.

“ _Duuuuutch,_ ” Jaq calls through the door. _“The cat pooped on the pilot seat._ ”

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” curses Dutch, spurring her into putting her pants on.

* * *

Once upon a time, Yalena Yardeen of Keffree was a wife, in a dreamy stars-aligned marriage that had only lasted for a whopping one hour. Before it all went to absolute shit, she had imagined that life as a queen consort was a kind of fairy-tale escape—she would be asked to be by the King’s side, asked to bear his children, raise his heir, oversee his court, _whatever_ else it was the girls in her childhood always yearned for. She would yearn for it too, as long as she would never be asked— _forced—_ to kill someone again.

Every so often Dutch wonders if she could go back to that dream, now that things at quieter, more stable, though no less murder-y on account of Aneela and who she married. Easy enough she could meet _someone_ at the bottom rungs of dastardly on Qresh, and be taken care of. Hells, she could be Delle Seyah Kendry’s second wife, if she asked.

She could have done what any sensible person would and married D’av. Had a family. Owned a farm. Arranged playdates with Johnny’s eventual kids. She could have had a good, loving, loophole-free life. Was this close to getting there, and it turned out she hadn’t wanted it at all. Had said yes and yes and yes on behalf of a future Dutch who would have wanted to say yes, waited and waited to grow into That Dutch, and then never did.

“I’m thinking he’s a McGriddle,” Jaq says, knocking Dutch out of her thoughts. She had cleaned the poop and Kendry had taken off to attend to Qresh nonsense. The orange, black and white furblob lay like a baby in Jaq’s arms, sleeping. The thing was just always sleeping.

“What?”

“Or a Poncho. Ampersand. Ooh, or— _Adelle._ ”

“Give this cat your mother’s forbidden first name and she will kill us both.”

Jaq shrugs, rubs McGriddle-Poncho-Ampersand-Adelle’s belly. “What do you want to name him?”

The cat yawns contentedly at Dutch’s touch when she runs her palm over the top of his head. “I don’t know. You can do it, if you like.”

“But he’s yours.”

Nearly on cue, the subject of their conversation rolls away from Jaq’s arms to settle himself in the pit made by Dutch’s criss-crossed legs, rubbing his head against her stomach and tumbling over to show his belly.

“Who _are_ you,” murmurs Dutch, nearly brought to tears as she is every time he displays such unhesitant trust in her. Then addresses Jaq again. “I mean, what if I gave him a name he doesn’t like.”

The corner of Jaq’s mouth quirks upward. “Then he can change it. I did that. Mom got over it super quick.”

“Uh, I don’t know how to tell you this, kiddo, but I don’t think our little friend can just tell me he wants to be called McChicken-Peacoat-Asterisk-Kendry instead.”

“Well, duh, cause that’s a fucking mouthful.”

A habitually D’avin-flavored reprimand over his language is on her lips before she remembers the D’avin part, and also before Jaq’s words bring her to another thought.

“Mouthful,” she repeats, thinking of how he cleans his bowl to a shine every meal and occasionally sticks his paw in her mouth when they’re resting together. “That’s a good one.”

Jaq laughs. “Wait, what?”

* * *

Mouthful learns to respond to his shiny new name, which Fancy had bet fifty joy against because he carried himself like a sack of barely sentient potatoes. He has also since gotten bold with his demand for attention and care, stomping over Dutch’s face and bruising her in the morning to be fed until she either relents or scolds with a firm _Mouthful, Stop That Shit_. It forces her out of her hard-to-budge oversleeping habit, timing with precision when to get up and fill his bowl before he cracks more of her ribs. She has a cup of coffee ( _yeah, yeah, one drug replaces another, eat my ass_ ) and watches him _mlam mlam mlam_ with delight. Between job searching and Qruber Eats gigs, she chases Mouthful around the ship, sometimes on all fours like a feral woodlander, creating makeshift jungle-gyms for the two of them to monkey around, and, on a bet that Fancy also loses, teaches Mouthful how to fetch.

His otherwise lack of fight-or-flight makes Dutch wonder if he had just belonged to the Derrishes before they discarded him for their son’s amusement. She catches him staring out at the Quad sometimes, paws against the windshield. No Lucy and No Others in the ship is a recess that inevitably cradles Dutch’s comfortability with straight up asking Mouthful what he’s thinking about, as if he could answer. Sometimes, though, he’ll crone in conversation. Sometimes it sounds sad.

Mouthful asleep and heavy on her lap keeps her heart from aching too much when she gets a text from D’av. _Delle Seyah said you got a cat????_

Dutch sends him a picture. _Yeah. I think he was a Jaqobis in a past life._

*

She stops being a dingus, for a little while. They agree to something simple. Lunch at Gared’s cafe in New Old Town, an establishment that was such a hit on Westerleith it stayed there rather than migrating back to a refurbished Westerlyn moon.

Dutch’s stomach twists in so many damn directions. How D’avin doesn’t fucking _hate_ every atom of her being is totally incomprehensible. She’s refused to see him for this long because any little thing can confirm what might be true, _has_ to be true. Docking on the rural sides of Westerleith to avoid being seen, Dutch considers greatly how stupid it would be if she downed her whole bar right now. How appealing it would seem, too, if the aftermath of this meeting with her ex-fiance whom she still loves and loves and loves and can’t give anything to, goes even a fraction awry.

How appealing it would be, to rewind to that wretched week, where she put her ship on full thrust and just flew, and flew, and flew.

And to top it all off, Mouthful, whom she sought small comfort from, is _hissing_ at her.

“Hey,” she tries more gently, heartbreak in her timbre, “Come on, Mouthie. Mom needs you right now.” She tries to cradle him despite the fierce to-and-fro whipping of his tail. He yowls again when her arms come around him, and then leaves a nasty set of red lines over her cheek and chest. A sharp and loud inhale leaves Dutch through her teeth as she all but flings him down.

“Fucking, _fine_!” she shouts, as he scurries away. “Get lost!”

*

Dutch considers, after nursing a small drink of an alcoholic nature, that she was being stupid and dramatic. Like she was some teenager in a bad coming-of-age film, lashing out at a cat like that. So what if he nicked her. He’s a cat, and that’s what wound wands were for, anyhow. When she sees him, she’ll be a lot calmer. There had to be a caveat in his absolute teddy-bear nature, somewhere, and a repulsion to human anxiety was perfectly adaptive. Probably.

But an hour before she’s scheduled to meet D’avin, Mouthful has yet to resurface. Dutch begins to scour the ship, shaking a tupperware of his favorite treats—the dental kind, cause his breath is Rancid untreated—to no avail. She checks her room. Under the bed. The vents. The cargo hold. The freezer room, while holding back bile at the possibility of finding him there. And then she sees that the ship’s drawbridge was fucking open.

“No,” Dutch breathes. She runs down the ramp to find an endless yellow of Leithian field, scanning desperately for that blob of orange black and white. “Mouthful!” she shouts. “ _Mouthful!_ ”

What a stupid name to shout. What a stupid way she’s crying. In pristine timing, her PDD rings, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do if it’s D’av, but hits accept immediately upon seeing Aneela’s name.

“Aneela,” Dutch cries, like a girl to her mother. “I lost Mouthful.”

Her face on the screen wrinkles. “Who?”

“The cat,” Dutch cries again, sniffling. “The stupid fucking cat.”

Whatever reason Aneela had called in the first place is wiped right off the table. “Wait for me.”

Dutch waits. Aneela’s own personal ship lands nearly next to hers, and for a sickening amount of seconds Dutch imagines that Mouthful had been hiding in that patch of grass. Aneela comes down from the ship’s elevator and meets Dutch halfway, taking her hand.

“We’ll find him, little bird,” Aneela says, wiping off the embarrassing tears from Dutch’s cheeks, then leading her through the fields.

“Can you sense him?” Dutch asks after a minute of wading through shin-deep grass, feeling ridiculous.

“Not yet,” Aneela replies. “Be patient.”

Dutch asks later, “What if he’s hurt?”

“We’ll know soon.”

Dutch asks later, again: “What if Zeph’s weird cult family got him and is roasting him over a spit?”

“You know they’re on the other side of this moon.”

“But—”

“Yala,” Aneela gently interrupts, pausing their search. “If I had known he would make you worse I would not have given him to you.”

The words splash over her like cold water. To be made worse: it implies you were a piece of a shit to begin with. Dutch's mouth shuts closed, hand going limp and falling away from Aneela’s. The glassy hurt ricochets right back at Aneela in axis-tilting devastation.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Aneela tries to amend, but Dutch moves away from her, sits dejectedly right in the middle of the field. Aneela follows, kneeling in front of her beseechingly at the risk of dry grass poking her this way and that. “Please, Yala.”

The sun is hot on the back of her head. If she closes her eyes and bends her brain hard enough it’s like she’s sitting on her shower floor.

“I’m meeting D’avin soon,” Dutch sniffles, the childish tones stripped away, though her face continues to wet.

Aneela takes both of her hands. “Oh?”

“I just don’t understand it. After everything I’ve done.”

A look of heartbreakingly pure love washes over Aneela’s face, the slope of her shoulders, the way she curls her fingers over Dutch’s. “It’s not a crime to want things, little bird.”

Dutch scoffs, existentially. “Isn’t it? Do I deserve to want?”

“Yes,” Aneela replies firmly. “If I do, as you say I do, then yes, Dutch. Always and without condition.”

A sob curdles in Dutch’s chest as new tears scorch tracks down to her chin, the effort of holding it in becoming so exhausting. “That’s not how it works for me.”

“That’s not true.”

“No? I wanted to escape Khlyen,” she shakes out, “and he followed me here instead. I wanted Johnny to stay with me, and he left, instead. I wanted—I wanted to _want_ to start a life with D’av, wanted to want what you and Kendry have, and then I. I didn’t, instead.” She pulls back a hand to wipe her snottied up nose with her sleeve, and laughs sardonically. “I wanted to keep a cat, and it ran away instead.”

Arms close around Dutch’s shoulders, and she cries fully into Aneela’s hair. She smells like rosewater and that distinct sterile scent of the green—she used to hate it. Now it grounds her and cradles her. It makes her think of how ferociously Aneela had held her when she had found her on the ship, at the end of that cursed week.

“Not all losses are disappointments,” Aneela says, not letting go. “You wanted me dead once. But now I’d break without you. You had always wanted to run, and now your name is known across the galaxy; you are loved by every person that meets you. I know you wanted to die, Yala,” her voice dips with heartache. “But right now you’re here. Unbroken. Still whole, no matter how it hurts.”

And fuck. It hurts.

“I’m sorry,” Dutch weeps, voice murky and strained, face still buried into Aneela’s shoulder. She remembers her in the greenspace, unyielding: _I didn’t give you life just so you could throw it away._ “I’m sorry.”

Aneela pulls back from their hug to kiss her forehead, once, twice. She holds her face, and Dutch wraps her hands around Aneela’s wrists like an anchor. Then she asks, quietly shattering like she’d been holding it in. “Why did you try, Dutch?”

“I felt there was no need for me,” Dutch says, realizing along the way that this is the first admission she’s made of it. It weighs heavy between them—but, she reflects, not as heavy as holding it herself. Not nearly.

“I’ll always need you, Yala Yardeen,” says Aneela resolutely. “I’ll live indefinitely, and I will always need you.”

She folds again in Aneela’s arms. She wants to be here. So she will.

*

Mouthful is still nowhere in sight. Aneela and Dutch walk arm in arm back to their ships. Aneela speaks in gentle tones about some connections Kendry has with professionals on Qresh, would she like the blackmailed list or the unblackmailed list? and Dutch replies, Aneela, I’m not seeing a therapist from _Qresh_.

When they reach Dutch’s ship, they find D’avin sitting on the still-opened ramp, Mouthful sleeping soundly on his lap.

Their eyes meet. The world doesn’t end.

“I think you lost this?” he says, gesturing to the cat, tentative and boyish.

Dutch smiles, and breathes. The dread in her gut is still there, but quieter. Aneela nudges her.

“How’d you figure?” Dutch says lightly.

Mouthful’s ears twitch at the sound of her voice, and immediately springboards off of D’av’s stomach ( _“Oof”_ ). In a matter of moments Dutch is cradling him again, like the first time she did after Aneela pulled the frog-eyed bebe out of an oversized hat. D’avin rises, approaching with such a heartachingly endearing amount of caution until Dutch decides to just meet him halfway.

“Hey,” she says, softly.

“Hey,” D’avin replies, in kind. They were friends first, Dutch remembers with clarity. She is fine to want that.

Mouthful purrs in her arms.

**Author's Note:**

> big heart tap to my killjoys village population of four, specifically strangesmallbard for the readthroughs early on; and to my own cat bebe, who i adopted in october and who is NOT a therapy stand-in at all........
> 
> thank you for reading!


End file.
